The Dream Quake by Elizabeth Knox

Author:Elizabeth Knox [Elizabeth Knox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571304028
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

It was hours before Laura let herself turn back towards the railway line. She took a course only tending towards where it lay. At every few steps she glanced around, looking for rangers on foot, or riding on a handcar. When the handcar did appear Laura was surprised how close it was. She threw herself down on the ground and lay completely still. Her bread-and-dust man tumbled off her back and lay still too, by her ear, with his cracked and drying hand against her cheek.

When Laura looked again the handcar had travelled out of sight.

Laura went on, parallel to the railway. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other, hour after hour. She walked, straining her eyes, looking and looking for any sign, however far off, of the Pinnacles and the tower.

She slept for a time, but badly. She was thirsty and feverish.

A nosebleed woke her. The blood only oozed, sluggish and tacky. While she held her nostrils pinched, trying to staunch it, her bread-and-dust man leaned against her knee and watched her.

‘He knows where I am. Wherever I am,’ Laura said to him, in a pinched, croaking voice she scarcely recognised as her own.

Eventually she got up and went on, not noticing that she’d left the little man behind, till she felt him leap and cling to the leg of her trousers. She scooped him up and put him on her shoulder.

She walked. Nothing moved but her. Hours went by, transparent, emptied out, even of time.

Laura’s lips cracked. Her tongue gradually grew a coat of some thick salty stuff. Then it began to swell.

Many hours later her bladder began to cramp. She fumbled at her trousers and squatted to urinate. It burned. There were only a few drops, and it went on burning deep inside her.

Laura sat down and cried – cried without producing tears.

The bread-and-dust man tugged on her hair.

She got up and went on.

Later – a long time later – Laura had a lucid moment. She thought: ‘I’ll die unless I let the rangers find me.’ She lifted her head and took a good look about. She could see no sign of the Pinnacles, not even a smudge on the horizon. She turned and saw she had wandered close to the raised trackbed. The steel lines were shining at her like water. She went towards them, clambered on all fours up the little slope and sat there, slumped.

Her bread-and-dust man scrambled off her and onto the trackbed. He doubled up and pressed his whole little length against the steel.

Laura thought: ‘He’s listening for a handcar.’ Then she lay down.

*

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